Album Notes

“Ukelele folk hip-hop” - how did that happen? Well, I found the ukelele in a garbage can when I was in high school and carried it everywhere. The hip-hop? That came after college, one rough summer in Hartford, CT. I was working 80 hours a week, organizing with students for clean air and power. It was the kind of thing where you talk and talk all day long about democracy and justice and health and change. You take it door-to-door and people keep slamming them in your face but you just keep talking, keep believing. On top of this, I'd just been through a couple kamikaze attempts at true love that left me raw and hungry. I turned to music, but none of my favorites, not the Beatles, not Miles Davis, not Bob Dylan were up to the task of getting me through. I needed something that just rocked. Something I could lean into, wail out at the top of my lungs; something to pour full of the gritty, buzzing exhaustion and hope of those days. My ukelele was with me, serving as my best friend, body guard and security blanket. But I couldn't plug it in or strum very loud. It’s hard to be hard-hitting with a small instrument most people think of as a kid’s toy. Rapping was really the only choice. Saturday mornings I would wake up with word & rhymes sprouting in my head and walk out with my uke through the streets flowing by the sleeping houses. Late at night, I tested my new songs with my team over trays of greasy pizza. I've been writing songs and poems and playing music my whole life, but these songs were a totally new experience. People kept thanking me, telling me I had hit something, even telling others. Not only could they relate this music, it was filling some empty place for them. Maybe I was delirious from lack of sleep, but I felt like people needed these songs – songs that are unabashedly political but also intimate, funky music to move to, laugh to, get dumped and fall in love to, music that got to the heart of what was happening to us. A couple years, a couple dozen original songs and shows later, I’ve devoted myself to this sound. I want to build it, develop it, and get it to more of the folks who could use it. I’m now living in DC, performing like crazy, putting together a band, planning the next album, and writing vocal parts for my wife, Lisette, who sings like a mermaid. It's still just four nylon strings strung on some barely-glued wood backing me up, and my mind charged up with the words and melodies of Oukast, Biggie, Common, Erykah Badu, Lauryn Hill and many more. Once upon a time I rescued my ukulele from the garbage. That ukulele and the music I make with it keep rescuing me – again and again and again...